Despite polling 51% of the vote with a margin of over 3.5 million votes beyond his opponent, the press is proving obsessive in terming the President's election triumph "extremely close." To clarify this for the sake of posterity, just how does Mr. Bush's victory stack up to other elections?

The answer is: while not a landslide of Reaganesque proportions, the President's victory compares well with others -- including some that one never hears called "extremely close."

We did the research so you don't have to, utilizing the wondrous resources available at US Election Atlas.org:

Clinton
President Clinton had a victory margin of 5,805,256 votes (43%) in 1992, expanding that to 8,201,370 (49%) in 1996. Of course, in addition to his Republican opponents he also had to fight off H. Ross Perot both times.

Carter
Perhaps most like this election's results was the 1976 race between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. Carter won with 50.8% of the vote, while Ford got 48% -- very similar to this year's percentages. But Carter's margin of victory was only 1,683,247.

Nixon
In 1968, a truly divisive year of polarized and angry voters, Richard Nixon won by only 511,944 -- 43.42% for him, 42.72% for Hubert Humphrey. (Oddly, this is almost exactly the 2000 popular vote margin of the explosive Mr. Gore. One wonders how the press would have spun it if he had triumphed somehow in the Electoral College.)

Kennedy
This is well known but bears repeating. President Kennedy, the Democrat archetype for what Presidents should be like, defeated Richard Nixon by a rather disputed margin of only 112,827 votes. Kennedy 49.72%, Nixon 49.55% were the final statistics.

Mr. Nixon did what Senator Kerry did (and Mr. Gore did not), famously deciding not to pull down the pillars of the temple in a fight to rule over it. Although this is all sometimes noted in history books, we do not recall much talk of Mr. Kennedy being regarded as a less-than-legitimate President for all the closeness of the vote. How politics has degenerated since then!

Truman
The President we believe is in many ways most similar to Mr. Bush. He defeated Dewey by 2,188,055 votes and 49.5%, Much to the head-wagging perplexity of the media of his time. This was mainly because (like Mr. Bush) he earned the trust of the common people, which the big-city elite could neither imagine or fathom.

Roosevelt
Franklin Roosevelt, the towering giant of the 20th century, won several landslides, of course. On the other hand, in 1944 he only triumphed by a margin almost indentical to that of President Bush: 3,594,987 ballots and 53%.

And for the sake of historical curiosity...


Lincoln
The greatest of all Presidents did not triumph by the greatest of all margins. Of course, there were a lot fewer voters back then (only about 4 1/2 million in 1860). Lincoln won the 1860 election by a mere 485,706 votes and a measly 39.82%, due to the four-way contest that year.

In 1865 he did somewhat better, but with a smaller margin: 405,581, but 55.02%.

Epilogue
Mr. Bush's victory this year is not a hairsbreadth triumph. In a hard-fought contest, he withstood as much paranoid propaganda and deluded vitriol as any President ever has and emerged with a victory quite similar to those of most other Presidents, and better than many.

Once again: This was not a "squeaker;" it was a reaffirmation, and a mandate.